He must be really mad.
Nicole sighed helplessly and went back to the rear house.
She examined the drawings in her hand and smiled subtly at the sight of a drawing of a little girl because she didn’t expect Evan to have an artistic hobby.
She frowned when her eyes settled on the next drawing. The little girl started to seem familiar.
Her eyes widened in shock when she saw the third drawing in which the girl featured in the two previous drawings was tiptoeing and biting a young lad’s shoulder. There was also a water gun beside them.
The rest of the drawings left Nicole astounded. When she finally finished going through all of them, she laid the stack of drawings on the table with her trembling hands as her suppressed memories resurfaced in her mind.
How could it be so coincidental? Could it be that Evan Seet was the boy she met years ago?
Nicole went through the connection among the series of mysterious events from the past few days in her mind. She came to the conclusion that it was too much of a coincidence, yet she found it hard to believe that Evan was the same boy she met years ago.
The boy she met was an outcast like her and was always beaten up in Rose Garden. She always thought that the boy was some servant’s child or a poor kid forced into work at a young age.
Certainly not the princely Evan Seet.
Nicole’s mind buzzed with confusion as she pondered whether to ask Evan about it the next day.
If he really was the boy, he must have remembered her all along.
Except that she wasn’t the same girl in his memories anymore because she had outgrown her vulnerability. Unlike her current cruel and greedy self in Evan’s opinion, she was a naive and weak little girl who was constantly bullied in the past.
If Evan was really the boy who helped her in the past, it might ruin his impression of her when he found out that she was the innocent little girl.
Maybe it isn’t him. Nicole assured herself. Maybe the drawings belong to one of the bodyguards or the servants. Maybe…
She couldn’t be sure about the boy’s identity anymore. Bitterness engulfed her as she stared at the drawings and traced her fingers across the little girl’s silhouette. Her eyes reddened and a lopsided smile appeared on her face when she thought of her past.
She was so small and fragile that she couldn’t fight back the bullies. It was the boy that always protected her and cared for her.
Just when she became reliant on him, he left Rose Garden all of a sudden and never returned.
She never knew his whereabouts after he left. All she knew was that she had to become stronger and look out for herself from then onwards because there was no longer someone else to protect her.
Her heart ached at the thought of her past.
At night, she had a dream of the boy waving at her under the rose trellis.
She was beaming so happily when she raced towards him in the dream. However, the boy vanished into thin air before she could get a good look of him.
Where are you? She looked around frantically in her dream.
“Tye!” Nicole gasped in her dream. The next thing she knew, she was panting and sitting wide awake on her bed. It took her a few deep breaths to calm down and realize that it was just a dream.
When she relaxed eventually, the image of the boy waving at her came back to haunt her. Who’s the one that drew these portraits of me?
She decided to find out everything from Evan tomorrow.
